Well, now and then….
Toniight I came across an old floppy disc containing all my articles that have been published. I had kept some of them on various websites (notably the Oakleaf Circle site), but lost them as I moved and revamped sites.
So I was quite pleased to find them again. Anyhoo, they are now back on the web, collected in one place. One of these days, I’ll put them onto this site, but the site needs reorganising (again!) and redesigning for that to happen. So for now, they’re up on a newoomh, a Google free site.
Go over and have a dekko….
All this week, BBC TV News has been congratulating itself on exposing an illegal immigration ring bringing in Pakistani workers, supplying them with fake documents and putting them to work as cheaply-paid undocumented labour. Good investigative journalism, and the highlight was a secretly filmed interview with a gang member boasting of how it was no problem to get hold of any kind of high-quality fake ID, including passports and driving licenses; he even had a stash of them right there, and very convincing they looked too.
So, what did a government spokesman have to say when presented with this?
Border and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne said: “This is fresh evidence for why ID cards are needed so urgently and why it is so misguided to propose shutting our new system down.”
Um, so he didn’t actually watch the bit about how easy it was to get hold of fake ID….?
Hmmm…
The drugs do work! Well, so far. I’m feeling cheerful and energetic, and generally much happier and healthier than I’ve been for bloody ages. I’ll have to tell Doc G about it – he’ll be pleased that something he’s prescribed for me is finally working.
So I’ve really been charging ahead with work – I’m setting up a CMS for a customer, using WordPress. Yes, it’s a blogging application – heck I’m using it right now – but it’s terrifically easy to turn it into a non-blog CMS. It’s PHP-based and open-source, so you can fiddle with the source code to your geeky little heart’s content if you’re so inclined. Even if you’re not much good with PHP, there are lots of useful plugins you can install to do the work for you. For instance, you can customise the entire admin section, with your client’s logo and whatever sections they need to use.
So, I’m cheerful again. Just hope it lasts……
I never take any notice of sell-by dates on food. If it smells OK and doesn’t look putrid, then it’s OK to eat. So I’ve always reckoned.
So, lunchtime yesterday: I’m making myself a sandwich; I drag out an opened pot of carrot & parsnip veggie puree spread from the back of the fridge – haven’t had any for quite a while and I feel like a change; spread it on bread; start to eat.
Notice a tiny smudge of mould on the spread remaining in the pot; think, as always “Hah! Bit of penicillin never hurt anyone!”.
Continue munching.
OK, you can guess what happened later… Anyway, it wasn’t too bad – an afternoon and evening of bellyache, punctuated by visits to the toilet. No throwing up, not a lot of … well, you know what.
Sell-by date on the spread: 16th May. Spread now in bin, along with a couple of other packets of rather elderly spread.
Pictures of New Age idiots digging a hole and lighting a fire in a Scheduled Ancient Monument.
Anybody else feel like shoving some suitably energised crystals up the orifices of these vandals?
(English Heritage and Cumbrian Police have already been informed.)
Oh well, been put on yet another lot of pills to try out. This time, it’s Verapamil ; it’s yet another calcium blocker, like the last lot. But Doc G says it will probably suit me better, and has different side effects. I bloody hope so – the Solatol gave me permanantly dry eyes and blurred vision, so I couldn’t read a book or look at the computer screen for long; also I was permanently tired, breathless, lethargic and mildly depressed. (On the plus side, I was sleeping better than I expected.)
Anyway, that’s why I’ve not posted anything recently. We’ll see how this new pill goes.
Maybe it will cure my procrastination – I’ve always had something of a problem with getting going on anything, but these last couple of weeks, I’ve not been wanting to anything that smacks of work. “Oh, look! The sun’s out – now’s the time to do some gardening instead of this….”)
A conversation with a friend the other night gave me the idea to research an article/blog post on the 2012 hysteria. He reminded me that Terence McKenna had predicted years ago that 2012 was some sort of singularity point for humanity, but without referencing the Mayans. So I’ve decided to try and find out who came up with the whole “2012 is Teh END!!!11!!” idea first – Terence “Psychonaut” McKenna, or Joseph “Harmonic Convergence” Arguelles (Arguelles was, I think, the first NuAger to claim that the Mayans had predicted it). It’ll be an interesting bit of research – and another excuse not to do any actual work!
RAF blow up world’s biggest drugs haul
RAF Harrier jump jets have blown up the world’s biggest drug haul in Afghanistan by dropping three 1,000lb bombs on a 237-ton stash of cannabis.
The haul – worth £225million and weighing more than 30 double-decker buses – was unearthed by the Special Boat Service and local commandos.
The drugs were first stuffed into grain sacks and buried in six trenches covering an area the size of two football pitches.
Officials believe the area – near to the Taliban stronghold of Quetta in Pakistan – was turning dried cannabis leaves into heroin.
Thanks to Bad Science.
I hate doing this to Doc G. He’s a good doctor and really wants to get me well. But pretty much everything he prescribes for me makes me iller than the original condition.
So I started the Diltiazem yesterday. By evening, I was getting signs of vaso-dilation/hypertension – headache, blurred vision, wrist-swelling (I can always tell when my blood pressure is up, because I have to loosen my wristwatch strap).
I slept pretty solidly, disturbed only by an upsetting dream in which two of my friends died one ofter the other. When I woke up, I had the phrase “Smell of burning rats” running through my head; it was somehow associated with the upsetting dream, but that was all I knew about it.
I also had a migraine that was gearing up into Flying-Scotsman-going-all-throttles-open-down-the-Shap-incline mode. So I had a fairly miserable day of things. I’ve just managed to have my first cup of tea of the day – before, everything that hit my stomach, including water, promptly came right back up; I’ll probably try a little cereal in a while.
I rang up Doc G and agreed to give Solatol another try; 40mg dose this time instead of 80mg. I’ll have many happy nights pacing around the place wishing I could sleep; many happy afternoons flat out on the sofa idly gazing at nothing. But at least I won’t have a migraine.
Bugger all this illness; I’ve had to email Roy Gillett and turn down the AAJ editorship job. It’s a great opportunity, more money, I’d love to do it. But I can’t be certain that my health will let me do a good job.
Smell of burning rats…..
Got to see Doc G this morning – had to cancel Friday’s appointment because we went off to Glasgow to pick up a printer.
Yesterday, I had yet another tachycardia attack – took an 80mg Solatol betablocker and spent the rest of the day exhausted and lying on the sofa in a fuzzed-out haze. The haze cleared by bedtime, but then I couldn’t sleep; it was nearly 4am before I finally got away to dreamland. But at least it was a pleasant night for insomnia, with a clear starry sky and a beautiful dawn. I even took a short walk up the hill and was lucky enough to see a bright, glinting Jupiter hanging low in the southern sky.
So when I explained to Doc G about how betablockers gave me sleep disturbances and other unpleasant side-effects, he suggested Diltiazem – not a betablocker, but something similar. It’s normally used for angina, but has the side-effect of stabilising certain types of heart irregularity. And I have mild angina anyway, so this could be a bonus.
Anyway, I’ve had one dose – so far, I’m getting a mild headache and visual blurring, but since it dilates the bloodvessels, I was expecting this. And these effects are likely to be temporary.
At least I hope so – I’ve got a magazine to put together and a book review to write this week. Apart from the bloodvessel-dilation effects, I’m now feeling much better; more energetic than I’ve been for the last few weeks and anxious to catch up on work.
Duma Key by Stephen King
I have to confess that I haven’t read that many Stephen King books. So this could be far from being one of his best. However, it’s very nearly the best King that I‘ve read so far.
1992’s Dolores Claiborne and last year’s Lisey’s Story I’d class as he very best; I liked Rose Madder enough to read it twice.
Of the other Kings that I’ve tried, I liked a few well enough – The Stand, The Shining, one or two others; One or two were just awful – The Cell comes to mind (was his editor on holiday when that came in?) and I couldn’t get past the second chapter of the first Dark Tower book.
The books of his that I liked all have one thing in common – they play down the gore (knowing that a key scene involved a character having his legs smashed with a hammer stopped me from even picking up Misery; the scene that caused me to put down the Dark Tower book for ever was a minutely-detailed description of a boy getting crushed by a car) and concentrate instead on the human element.
Duma Key reliably carries on with what seems to be King’s new motif – that of the ‘wounded artist’ who has been terribly injured in a traumatic life-changing accident. Edgar Freemantle is a successful building contractor who loses an argument with a crane one day and ends up brain-damaged and minus one arm and his wife. Moving to a remote Florida key, he develops an overwhelming obsession to draw and paint, even though he has never been interested in art before. Naturally, this sudden talent of his is not entirely natural…..
What I liked: the descriptions of Freemantle in his painting ‘frenzies’ – I’ve never got that intense, but I have pretty much lost myself in painting sessions; the descriptions of Freemantle’s friend Wireman – one of the best depictions of male friendship I’ve read; the descriptions of the pitiless depredations of Alzheimer’s; the thorough fleshing-out of even the subsidiary characters (with one exception); the nice, sneaky literary device of occasionally referring to the one-armed Freemantle’s “hands”, which makes you sit up and say “Hey, did I just read hands-?”. Oh, and the real can’t-put-this-down hold of the story.
What I didn’t like: the treatment of the one character that was little more than a two-dimensional cipher, even though he was essential to the later action – he had a name but might just as well have been called The Sidekick, since that was pretty much all we were shown of him. Why King couldn’t have given him a backstory and fleshed him out as much as he did with characters who were given only a couple of pages, I have no idea. And I didn’t like the way that we were told so little of how Freemantle managed everyday life without an arm. We were told how difficult it was for him to drive, but when he did drive, there was no indication of any problems; there a scene where he had to stand up and read from a book – King gave us no indication of how a one-armed man can turn the pages of a book he is holding. And although there are detailed descriptions of his painting sessions, we get no indication of how he manages to, for instance, unscrew the cap of a paint tube. OK, the lack of such descriptions don’t detract from the story – which is terrific – but I do wonder why King couldn’t have found a one-armed artist to observe at work.